All American Citizens Should Be Able to Run for President

I was not born in this country. My parents are both natural-born American citizens, but I was born in Sydney, Australia, because my dad was working there at the time. They moved us back to America when I was just four months old, and so I am Australian by birth only. In every other aspect, I am American. I like large portions. I watch football. I’m obsessed with sex but never talk about it at dinner. I speak normally, not with a Crocodile Dundee accent. Stuff like that.

Depending upon whom you ask, this renders me ineligible to run for president of the United States, which, by the way, is a relief for ALL of us. I’ll never be able to raise campaign funds, or deliver stump speeches, or go around kissing filthy babies. And that’s fine by me, because all of that is terrible.

However, we do have some foreign-born citizens who are dumb enough to actually WANT to run for president. Like Ted Cruz! Ted Cruz wants to be president, but recently he’s been subjected to a great deal of scrutiny because he was indisputably NOT born in the United States. Cruz’s mom is a natural-born American citizens (like mine!), and he believes this overrides the inconvenient truth that he was born in Canada. He believes he qualifies for birthright citizenship, which makes him “natural-born,” thus fulfilling the mandate of the U.S. Constitution, which reads:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United
States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be
eligible to the Office of President.

As with virtually every other part of the Constitution, there is more than enough wiggle room here to endlessly parse every single word, such as “natural" and "born.” The Founding Fathers did a shit job with specifics, if you ask me. We have a big, expensive court system set up just to figure out what the hell they were talking about, and we’ll never really know for sure because they’re all dead! And as a result, we now have no idea whether or not Cruz is eligible to run for president.

Here's my take, which is admittedly biased: He should be eligible. I know Cruz is a hilariously corrupt shitbag who is hell-bent on perfecting a desolate American hellscape in which four billionaires own the stem-cell-fluid rights to all the poors. Also, he looks like Mr. Bean if Mr. Bean were a serial killer. But people should leave him the hell alone and let him run. In fact, anyone who is an American citizen should be eligible to run for president. Why the hell not? As much as I enjoy a birther controversy getting thrown back in the GOP’s face, this clause in the Constitution is bullshit and should be stricken from the document.

Have you SEEN this pool of presidential candidates? Have you heard them speak? Our grueling electoral process, coupled with our general antipathy toward politics in general, has left us with just a tiny handful of nut jobs and psychopaths willing to take the job. My fellow Americans, we need as many eligible citizens to run for office as we can find: immigrants, army brats, Canadians, tourists lost in Disneyworld... I don’t care if you were only here for a layover on the way from London to Acapulco: WE NEED YOU. One of the reasons I found the original Obama birther controversy so laughable was because even if Obama HAD been born in Kenya, I didn’t really give a shit. I’ll take a couple more Kenyan-born presidents, actually. Obama’s been perfectly adequate.

In fact, there’s a very good chance that a foreign-born American president will put in a better effort than any of his natural-born peers. It’s not easy becoming a U.S. citizen these days. If you’re courageous enough to withstand all the Kafkaesque red tape and the threat of deportation and the expired visas and the ENDLESS hostility some Americans have toward immigrants, then by God, you’re the kind of guy I want in the Oval Office. You have grit. You WANTED it more than your average Faygo-swilling, American-born neighbor. You’re already steeled for the process. And if you’re some sleeper agent sent here to destroy us by assuming the highest office in the land and you pull it off despite all the vetting, then honestly, hats off to you. You deserve to crush us from within. You earned it.

But more than that, it’s strange to me that you can become an American citizen and have all the attending rights and privileges of being an American bestowed upon you, except this one. This one stupid rule prevents foreign-born citizens from ever becoming full citizens, and that goes against the idea of what it means to be American. Once you’re American, you deserve to be ALL American. That’s the whole point of this country: people coming from far and wide and settling down here and feeling, in some way, that they have the power to make this country their own. You make America, and America makes you back. That’s the dream, however corrupt it may be. That’s what makes America different from everywhere else.

Dreams are a big part of what it means to be a shithead American. You dream about starting your own business. You dream about winning Powerball. You dream about punching out motorists during a traffic jam. And you dream about being president. Very few newcomers would take advantage of a change to the birth clause in the Constitution, but that’s not the point. The point is that if you say to someone who was born in Poland and now lives here, “Hey! Welcome to America! You’re free to do anything here, EXCEPT aspire to the most prestigious position in our government,” you take something away from that person. You take away a dream that could one day prove useful in any number of ways. Maybe they don’t become president, but they do some remarkable things along the way, like inventing a hoverboard that actually hovers. Knowing such a thing is possible can make a big difference in the long run.

So I say let Cruz run. Let him barnstorm the countryside, doing horrible Simpsons impressions and stumping to lower the minimum wage to five cents an hour. Let him lose on the merits, instead of on an ancient technicality. If you've got a driver’s license, or a passport, or a Subway club card, you should be able to run. You should be able to do this lousy job, if for some stupid reason you actually want it. You deserve every last right any other American has, and nothing less.

(Update: An earlier version of this post said both of Cruz's parents were born in America. His father was born in Cuba. My take still stands.)

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